A first for everything: Greece, Denmark, Norway

Tue May 17 2016 10:34:16 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)

Writing this with a very slow connection in Thessaloniki, Greece (ahhh, hotel internet).

I am very excited that my Greek studies are finally coming in handy and so I can read the street signs even if they're written using the Greek alphabet. It sort of reminded me to last year when I was in Hong Kong and couldn't read the signs... except now I can! Yay!

I arrived yesterday after a terribly early flight--but then it was well past noon because of the +2h timezone.

Kostas, one of the organisers of DEVit, helped me get a SIM card and he was OK with me telling the world that it took us an hour and a half to get it working with data, because all of the processes they require. I think we did three queues and had time to go for lunch and go back. We also had to enable the Greek keyboard on my phone in order to send a text to the operator containing the Greek 'y' (which is not the same as the English keyboard 'y'), and then it would send me 5 texts in response, confirming whatever it is the 'y' meant (I mentally read it as "why?") with a lot of ALL UPPERCASE Greek paragraphs.

I will just say that in London you can turn up at a shop and buy a SIM with pre-paid credit in 5 minutes, so if I didn't come from Spain where these processes are similarly ridiculous, I would have been wildly amused.

I re-learnt the most important sentences:

παρακαλω = parakalo = please

ευχαριστωσ = eucharistos = thanks

and last but not least: χαχαχα = hahaha = jajaja 😃

This is also my first time in Greece so I don't quite know what to expect, but so far it seems welcoming, nice and sunny, full of interesting things to look at, and also very busy. I did try a gyros and I'm looking forward to trying out the Greek coffee: "cooked!". Will report.

Side note: for a Spanish speaker, hearing spoken Greek in the background is funny: your brain thinks it can understand it because the cadence is very similar to Spanish and many Spanish words are of Greek origin, but then it starts to pay attention and realises it actually can't.

I'll attend the NodeJS/Ruby synergy meetup this evening... be sure to say hi and bring all your synergies and thoughts out of the box!

Next week I'll be in Denmark for AtTheFrontEnd and the following week will see me in Norway for WebRebels. I've not been in either country before, so those will be another two first times for me, but if they're anything like Sweden or Finland I'll be more than happy.